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What is Agile?

Everybody is talking about it: Agile. Agile projects, agile people, agile marketing: organizations want to be agile in all aspects. But what is agile? Agile is a way to organize that focuses on flexibility. Flexibility is needed because the world around us is constantly changing.In our experience, there are four characteristics of an agile organization: a flexible strategy, multidisciplinary teams, short cycles, and visualization. Our video provides a summary:

1. Flexible strategy
Agile organizations have a clear purpose: they know why they exist. How exactly you will achieve your long-term goals, is something that is impossible to predict in this constantly changing world. That is why agile relies on flexible strategies. Such a strategy is made with the whole organization and with a minimum of documentation.

2. Multidisciplinary teams
An agile organisation is not focused on departments, but on teams. These teams are multidisciplinary, have their own end-to-end responsibility and are free to experiment. To get teams and groups of teams to work towards company ambitions, agile organizations set clear process guidelines.

3. Short cycles
In a fixed rhythm, agile organizations achieve results. This ‘heartbeat’ helps teams to deliver value for the customer constantly and to learn from experience. These cycles are 1 or 2 weeks on average. Customers and other stakeholders help to improve and create insights after each cycle by giving feedback. Detailed long term planning? This is a thing of the past for agile organizations!

4. Visualization
A team and an organization want to see where they are: what are their current ambitions, what progress is being made and are there any impediments? In an agile organization, most information is visualized and updated constantly. You’ll see Agile Portfolio Management boards, Scrum boards and other boards everywhere.